Elon Musk hasn’t stopped making waves on Twitter since he bought the platform a few months ago. From carrying out massive layoffs (and resignations by employees who couldn’t stand their new boss) to seeing his stock drop significantly, Musk is signifying little short of the apocalypse for Twitterers.
Even so, you can’t blame him for not trying things to get his platform off the ground: he started with the blue check, moved on to uploading long videos and now wants to turn Twitter into a payment platform in the style of PayPal or Apple Play.
Yes, just as it sounds. According to a Financial Times exclusive, Twitter has acquired several new licenses to become a financial institution in the United States. This would mean that we could end up managing our money from the social network, and use it to pay in the same way as other applications.
In this way, users will be able to buy things directly on Twitter, and also send money to each other. But, although Musk is a loyal fan of cryptocurrencies, it seems that the system will be based on fiduciary payments.
This would also allow the app itself to “pay” creators for their content, a feature Musk had already revealed he wanted to include and which may become a reality in a simpler way than we thought.
An app to rule them all
Although coming from a social network like Twitter this seems more than strange news, it is not news that Elon Musk wants to turn his platform into a “super app” that does everything. It would be more of a Meta than what we understand as Twitter, a company with several other derivatives with which to do anything.
Leading this new direction is Esther Crawford, Twitter’s director of product management. Crawford is one of Musk’s few defenders in his takeover of the company, and may be the key to getting the social network back on its feet.
This is not the first time Musk has been involved in such a venture. In 1999, the entrepreneur founded X.com, one of the first online banks that later became part of Paypal, of which he is considered one of the creators. Thus, it is a market in which he moves perfectly and which is perhaps less big for him than that of social networks.
